Continuing on its quest for world domination, it appears that Google is diving deeper into the gaming space, rumored to be working on a gaming console and/or service, as originally reported by The Information.
While nothing has been officially confirmed surrounding the mysterious project codenamed “Yeti,” it is rumored to be a streaming service of sorts for video games, along the same lines as PlayStation Now and GeForce Now, the latter of which is still currently in beta. PlayStation Now enables gamers to subscribe to a streaming service allowing them to pick from a library of on-demand games delivered directly to their console or Windows PC.
These reports are purely speculative at this point, but all of the pieces do maintain an interesting connection. The project has reportedly been in development for two years, led by Mario Queiroz, Vice President of Product Management, and Majd Bakar, Vice President of Engineering. Both individuals are hardware executives for Google.
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An additional report surrounding the validity of this rumor comes with the hiring of Phil Harrison as the new Vice President and GM of Google, reporting directly to Google’s Senior Vice President of Hardware. Harrison is a fifteen-plus year game industry veteran who worked for both Sony and, more recently, Microsoft in the Xbox division. It seems reasonable to believe that if a new Google-based game streaming service does go to market, a physical console would come along as well.
Google experimented with gaming hardware before, most notably in 2014 with the Nexus Player. However, the hardware just did not live up to the hype as it was incapable of coming even close to the content and graphical capabilities of the more heavy-hitting consoles from Sony, Microsoft. More recently, Google has expanded its presence within the realm of gaming through its YouTube Gaming platform, a live-streaming service designed to compete with Amazon’s Twitch.TV.
Aside from PlayStation Now, technical capabilities and supporting demanding infrastructure are the primary reasons that the industry as a whole has yet to adopt live-game streaming services. However, especially considering the hardware-centric team reportedly attached to the project, if any company is able to bring a new game streaming service to the industry, it would make sense that it could be Google.